Genetic Signatures May Help Predictive Climate Models

In Tennessee, a team of researchers has teamed up to understand how selection affects plants and the genome level as poplar trees adapted to temperature and light factors in a study recently published in Nature Genetics. “If you know every base in a genome, you can skip whole generations and use genomic information to predict how well an individual will do,” said study author Luke Evans of West Virginia University. “Plantations serve as the initial tests where you can take that genomic information and calibrate those predictions. With those reference points, you can scale everything.”

The research team, comprised of the DOE Joint Genome Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and West Virginia University, has been conducting the study for several years and their research has been cited more than 1000 times by a number of journals.